As is known, in the specific technical field to which this invention is related, there exists a growing demand for sewing machines which be extremely flexible as concerns their operation.
This demand has been met in part by the availability of direct current electric motors controlled through a programmable microprocessor. In fact, the use of such motors on industrial sewing machines has enabled the use of their associated microprocessor for storing and subsequently carrying out varying types of sewing programs in an automatic fashion. Each program comprises pre-selected sequels of sewing steps to be carried out with great accuracy.
While being advantageous from several aspects, and basically achieving their objectives, prior art sewing machines have, however, some limitations arising from their practical inability to follow any types of sewing programs, or in other words, any sequel of sewing steps possibly wanted by their users.
It should be noted that this practical inability is more due to the prior art failure to provide the user with control panels for the microprocessor which could allow said sewing programs to be changed as desired, than to the size of the program memory associated with the microprocessor, which can be easily expanded as required to accommodate a larger number of sewing programs. In fact, the prior art currently proposes as a solution that sewing machines be equipped with control panels including an alphanumeric display and a control keyboard effective to enable the values to be changed of various operational parameters related to the sewing programs.
These conventional control panels have shown to be only usable by highly qualified personnel familiar with every detail of the nature of the various sewing programs. In fact, alteration of just one program step would involve the entry and/or change of certain alphanumeric codes, available from the handbook of the machine, but not to be arrived at intuitively by ordinary users of the machine.
In addition, the complicated structure of the control panel imposes a training work on the user which is often inconsistent with his/her professional qualifications.